Galileo Group, Inc., announced today that it has completed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight operations and hyperspectral data collections for a series of missions supporting a NASA sponsored project to map sea grass beds and coral reefs in the Florida keys.

You move, he moves. You smile, he smiles. You get angry, he gets angry. "He" is the avator you chose. Faceshift, from EPFL's Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory, now offers a software program that could save time for the designers of animation or video games.

Are you into robots? Do you like finding out what types of robots are roaming around the world - and sometimes in space - and seeing how they work? If so, you're in luck because now there's an app for that.

Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) and Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) of Johnstown, Pa., are working with the Air Force Research Laboratory and Ogden Air Logistics Center 309 AMXG to develop and demonstrate a robotic system that uses high-powered lasers to remove coatings from fighter and cargo aircraft.

BFS-Auto can achieve high-speed and high-definition book digitization at over 250 pages/min using the original media format. This performance is realized by three key points: high-speed fully-automated page flipping, real-time 3D recognition of the flipped pages, and high-accuracy restoration to a flat document image.

QBotix, a company bringing the power of robotics to solar energy, developed the QBotix Tracking System, a comprehensive dual-axis tracking system that employs rugged, intelligent and mobile robots to dynamically operate solar power plants and maximize energy output.

San Francisco-based robotics company Momentum Machines - which produced a fully-automated burger-making machine earlier this year - may be opening a chain of 'smart', robot-run gourmet fast food restaurants.

Toshiba Corp. unveiled a robot Wednesday that the company says can withstand high radiation and help in nuclear disasters. But it remains unclear what exactly the new machine will be capable of doing if and when it gets the go-ahead to enter Japan's crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.

Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) have published findings that further illuminate the emerging field of ethorobotics - the study of bioinspired robots interacting with live animal counterparts.

Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called "killer robots", would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.

Mathematicians at the University of California, Merced created a model of penguin huddles that assumes each penguin aims solely to minimize its own heat loss. Surprisingly, the model reveals that such self-centered behavior results in an equitable sharing of heat.

In the past the key reasons for investing in robot based automation were all about improving productivity, reducing costs, increasing manufacturing flexibility or delivering consistent product quality. But more and more manufacturers are now citing employee safety as a key reason to deploy robots.